Tag: Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız

Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words, my new chapbook, is now available to buy from this site. It contains a series of poems expanding on some impossibly strange long words from various different languages. Postage is free and proceeds go to Swansea Bay Asylum Seekers Support Group. There’s an afterword from the marvellous Mark Waldron.

Long Words is also reviewed in Zarf zine by Julia Rose Lewis, where she says ‘With bull excrement, sorrels, and vaginas, Davies’ poems bring the long words alive and will turn many readers into sesquipedalians.’

Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words by Nia Davies is out now from Hafan Press’s Boiled String Chapbook series.

To get a copy for £9.50 (and free postage!) visit this page to use PayPal. Or send your terrestrial address to t.cheesman@swansea.ac.uk AND £9.50 by cheque to SWANSEA BAY ASSG.

Inspired by the Turkish tongue-twister Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız (Are you one of those we tried to make to be originating from Czechoslovakia?), the poems in this chapbook take their titles from the English translations of long words in various languages. These are words that can (barely) be translated as: ‘For those who were repeatedly unable to pick enough of small wood-sorrels in the past’, ‘To the least able to be making less understandable’, ‘For your [plural] continued behaviour as if you could not be desecrated’.

In the gaps between what we say and what we mean, between one language and another, Nia Davies finds such figures and motifs as contemptible palaeontologists, collective farms, the murdered women in Bolaño’s 2666, the never-ending suffix, dusty chickens, Estonian palindromes, ‘splitters gurning on white cream’, lies, drunkenness and the tortured question ‘what is poetry?’:

communication is not the aim of poetry
poetry is not the aim of communication
it gets in the way though somehow doesn’t it?

These are poems written in the shadow of the untranslatable/unconscious ‘fossil inside’.

My new sequence of poems Çekoslovakyalılaştıramadıklarımızdanmısınız or Long Words features poems with titles taken from the English translations of long words in various languages. Extracts have been published so far in the following online magazines:

– for your [plural] continued behaviour as if you could not be desecrated (Hungarian)
– also for those who have turned like counterrevolutionaries (Georgian)
– for those who were repeatedly unable to pick enough of small wood-sorrels in the past (Lithuanian)
– to the least able to be making less understandable (Czech)

– a dusty place where chickens usually groom themselves (Tagalog)
– [two] people trying to scatter pretended lies with each other (Tagalog)
– when our resentments will have (Hebrew)
– are you one of those people whom we couldn’t make to be originating from Czechoslovakia? (Turkish)